Woman at Point Zero

It looked to me as though this woman who had killed a human being, and was shortly to be killed herself, was a much better person than I. Compared to her, I was nothing but a small insect crawling upon the land amidst millions of other insects.

That love of the ruler and love of Allah were and one indivisible. Allah protect our ruler for many long years and may he remain a source of inspiration and strength to our country, the Arab Nation and all Mankind.

All I can remember are two rings of intense white surrounded by two circles of intense black. I only had to look into them for the white to become whiter and the black even blacker, as though sunlight was pouring into them from some magical source neither on earth, nor in the sky.

I knew that women did not become heads of state, but I felt that I was not like other women, nor like the girls around me who kept talking about love, or about men. For these were subjects I never mentioned. Somehow I was not interested in the things that occupied their minds, and what seemed of importance to them struck me as being trivial.

“Firdaus has grown, your holiness, and must be married. It is risky for her to continue without a husband. She is a good girl, but the world is full of bastards.”

All I know is that anything I would have to face in the world had become less frightening than the vision of those two eyes, which sent a cold shiver running through my spine whenever I remembered them.

At night [Sheikh Mahmoud] would wind his legs and arms around me and let his old, gnarled hands travel all over my body, like the claws of a starving man who has been deprived of real food for many years wipe the bowl of food clean, and leave not a single crumb behind.

She replied that it was precisely men well versed in their religion who beat their wives. The precepts of religion permitted such punishment. A virtuous woman was not supposed to complain about her husband. Her duty was perfect obedience.

It was though I was seeing the eyes that now confronted me for the first time. Two jet black surfaces that stared into my eyes, travelled with an infinitely slow movement over my face, and my neck, and then dropped downwards gradually over my breast, and my belly, to settle somewhere just below it, between my thighs.

I never used to leave the house. In fact, I never even left the bedroom. Day and night I lay on the bed, crucified, and every hour a man would come in.

I realized this was the first time in my life I was eating without being watched by two eyes gazing into my plate to see how much food I took. Ever since I was born those two eyes had always been there, wide open, staring, unflinching, following every morsel of food on my plate.

How many were the years of my life that went by before my body, and my self really became mine, to do with them as I wished? How many were the years I lost before I tore my body and my self away from the people who held me in their grasp from the very first day?

I was prepared to do anything to put a stop to the insults that my ears had grown used to hearing, to keep the brazen eyes from running all over my body.

After I had spent three years in the company, I realized that as a prostitute I had been looked upon with more respect, and been valued more highly than all the female employees, myself included.

As a prostitute I was not myself, my feelings did not arise from within me. Nothing could really hurt me and make me suffer then the way I was suffering now. Never had I felt so humiliated as I felt this time. Perhaps as a prostitute I had known so deep a humiliation that nothing really counted.

A successful prostitute is better than a misled saint. All women are victims of deception. Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows.

I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another. Because I was intelligent, I preferred to be a free prostitute, rather than an enslaved wife.

One day, when I donated some money to a charitable association, the newspapers published pictures of me and sang my praises as the model of a citizen with a sense of civic responsibility. And from then on, whenever I needed a dose of honor and fame, I had only to draw some money from the bank.

Why was it that I had never stabbed a man before? I realized that I had been afraid, and that the fear had been with me all the time, until the fleeting moment when I read fear in [Marzouk’s] eyes.

“I am not a prostitute. But right from my early days my father, my uncle, my husband, all of them, taught me to grow up as a prostitute.”

In prison, they kept me in a room where the windows and doors were always shut. I knew why they were so afraid of me. I was the only woman who had torn the mask away, and exposed the face of their ugly reality.